Presidents of the Eurasian Economic Union member states

MOSCOW, September 29. /TASS/. The Eurasian Economic Union was established through compromise and not by force, Russian President Vladimir Putin told US journalist Charlie Rose in an interview with CBS and PBS.

"We have established the Customs Union and the Eurasian Economic Union not by force, but through a compromise," Putin said. "It was a challenging, complicated, multi-year process based on agreement, compromise and mutually acceptable conditions in the hope of creating for our economies and for our people better competitive advantages in the world markets and in the world as a whole," the Russian President added.

No armed forces are needed at all to implement processes of natural economic, humanitarian, and social integration, Putin said. "We want to, at least, preserve the common humanitarian space within the modern civilized framework, we want to ensure that there are no national boundaries, so that people could freely communicate with each other, and we want the joint economy to develop using the advantages that we inherited from the Soviet Union," the Russian President added.

They include "the common infrastructure, railway transport, road network, power system and finally, I dare say, the great Russian language, which unites all former republics of the Soviet Union and gives us clear competitive advantages in promoting various integration projects in the former Soviet Union area," the Russian leader said.

"When people communicate freely, when labour force, goods, services and funds move freely as well, when there are no state dividing lines and when we have common legal regulation, for example, in the social sphere - all that is good enough, people should feel free," the Russian President said.